L'Enfant Et Le Psychanalyste. La Question De La Technique Dans La Psychanalyse Des Enfants. (The Child and the Psychoanalyst. The Question of Technique in Child Psychoanalysis.): Antonino Ferro Translated from Italian by Patrick and Danièle Faugeras. Ramonville Saint-Agne: Editions Erès, 1997. 248 pp.

This book, a translation into French of the work of an Italian child analyst, introduces a new variation on the understanding of the analytic couple. In the work itself, this understanding is applied mainly to the analysis of children, but does not need to be restricted to it. It addresses what the author calls “le champ,” the field, created in the interaction between the two participants. The concept derives much of its power from the projective identification which Ferro sees in most interactions, especially in cases of severe pathology.

This work is most impressive and convincing; the author has all the modesty and integrity one hopes for in an analyst; and the illustrations are vivid to the point of giving the reader a sense of participation in a fascinating search for establishing or re-establishing contact within the psychoanalytic couple. What Ferro describes is, of course, what troubles us most: the knotting and the unknotting of the threads within the therapeutic relationship. He implicates himself and his internal processes at the same time as he attempts to understand the patient. If this sounds familiar, it is because of the resemblance of this approach to others using projective identification and the notion of the evacuation of parts of the psyche into the other. Yet Ferro believes that he goes one step further when he suggests that “it is not only the patient who influences the analyst, with all the problems of countertransference which derive from it, but for the most diverse reasons, it is also the analyst who influences the patient” (p. 213). The influences Ferro describes consist in projective identifications, literal evacuations into the patient of affective components which the analyst is unable to symbolize and therefore experience as part of him or herself.

Ferro contrasts his approach with those of other analysts by demonstrating how his successful interpretations are “non-saturated and weak” and remain within the field of the analytic couple w